Birdwatching in the 4th Dimension

The birds left last autumn. All of them.
It was a departure so well-orchestrated
that you could have mistaken their wings
for rustling leaves—except, being birds,
they lifted upwards instead of falling.
Many millions of them.
Robins and finches
crows and cranes.
The waxwings and the warblers
The buzzards
and the blue jays.

My friend saw a sparrow suddenly blip out
of existence, leaving a neon blue afterimage.

A woman across the street watched her canaries
phase through their cage like melted candlewax.

The local magpies disappeared in synchrony.
They resembled smudges or thumbprints,
each a blot of India ink sinking tunefully into cloud.

The silence that followed was loud,
like the buzz after a rock concert.
Our senses were aflutter. It was as if we had lived
through something both vital and devastating.

On that day, every avian shook loose its scientific
name, leaving ornithologists baffled. The calls
we had catalogued so painstakingly ceased to exist.
No more caw-caw, hoo-hoo, or tweedle-dee.
Perhaps only absence could convince us
that it had been quenching enough just to see
the birds. And in seeing, to share their company.

how to share dreams

i wake
too often
wanting
to preserve
my dream
for you—
to articulate it
like a seraphic
wing; a
crisp jazz
recording
or a moth’s
fossilized
sigh; no i
cannot
promise you
the core
of imagined
experience—
much less
the entire
dinosaur! —
but maybe
i can muster
a skeleton
a tooth
or a footprint.
some scantily
illustrious
proof.

Kristin Emanuel is passionate about narrative and hybridized poetics. She received a BA in Creative Writing at the University of Arkansas and is currently pursuing an MFA in poetry at the University of Kansas. Her poetry explores memory, the dreaming mind, and birds. Her poems have been published in Polaris, Sagebrush Review, and Poached Hare and also forthcoming in Tilde, and The Offbeat.

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